Groundwork

How the future of Ground Zero is being resolved.

For much of the eighteenth century, Greenwich Street marked the western edge of Manhattan. It ran along the Hudson River from the southern tip of the island to a rural precinct—Greenwich Village—two miles north. By 1800, after landfills had been thrust into the river, Greenwich Street was a couple of blocks inland. It was once a fashionable place to live, but, as docks were built to the west, the neighborhood became crowded with boarding houses and industrial buildings. "This section of the metropolis is beginning to pass all toleration," George Templeton Strong, a Greenwich Street resident, wrote in his diary in 1845. Strong moved to Gramercy Park. In 1868, an elevated railway was built on Greenwich Street, from the Battery to Cortlandt Street. Toward the end of the century, the city's first Arab community, mostly immigrants from Lebanon and Syria, settled on the street's southern blocks.

In the mid-twentieth century, the area around Greenwich and Cortlandt Streets was filled with run-down office buildings, old warehouses, and the largest collection of electronics stores in the world, an amalgam of small shops known as Radio Row. And then, in 1968, a big chunk of Greenwich Street ceased to exist. Five blocks of it, along with three streets that crossed it from east to west, were obliterated to make way for the World Trade Center, which required sixteen acres of unbroken land. The architect who designed the Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki, believed that streets were relics of a messy and rambunctious past. Superblocks—big, open expanses of concrete that served as podiums for modern buildings—were much more appealing.

Between the completion of the Trade Center, in 1973, and its sudden destruction, on September 11th last year, there were two Greenwich Streets—a short, stubby remnant that extended for a few blocks south of Liberty Street, and a longer section that began just north of the Trade Center and went uptown to Gansevoort Street in the West Village. In 1987, a developer, Larry Silverstein, built a huge slab of a building, 7 World Trade Center, which created a wall between the northern section of Greenwich Street and the rest of the Trade Center complex. The building, which housed the command center of the city's Office of Emergency Management, burned and collapsed late in the afternoon on September 11th. Now that it and the twin towers are gone, it is possible to look up and down the original route of Greenwich Street for the first time in more than thirty years.

The terrorist attacks of September 11th were mass murder on a scale that still seems unimaginable, but it hasn't been possible to remain paralyzed by the horror. In coping with the physical damage, we have been forced to rethink a part of the city wholesale, and we have the opportunity to fix a lot of mistakes. The elimination of Greenwich Street to make way for the World Trade Center represents what was wrong with an entire generation's worth of architecture and planning.

That Greenwich Street will be restored to its original state, at least as an unimpeded thoroughfare, is one of the few things that seem certain about the future of the World Trade Center site, which has inspired more public forums, hearings, debates, op-ed articles, and design proposals than any urban-planning question in the city's history. There won't be firm plans for the site until the end of the year, at the earliest, which irritates some people—like Andrew Cuomo, who is running for governor, and the members of the editorial boards of the New York Times and the New York Post. They think that the planners are being unreasonably slow. But if you consider the enormity of what happened on September 11th and the magnitude of the task of rebuilding, they are working fairly quickly. Dealing with the site is the greatest logistical challenge the city has faced in modern times, and deciding how to handle this challenge is, in effect, a referendum about what the city's symbolic center should be.

When the World Trade Center was conceived, in the early nineteen-sixties, city planning was still dictated by autocrats like Nelson Rockefeller and Robert Moses, who was the public-works czar of New York for nearly half a century. But Moses's approach was being undermined by that of the critic Jane Jacobs, who celebrated street life and neighborhoods, and who helped to kill the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a Moses project. Autocracy has now given way almost completely to populism. It seems a little incongruous that a patrician, John Whitehead, has been assigned the task of coördinating the plans for the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. Whitehead was the co-chairman of Goldman, Sachs. He has an elegant office filled with antiques in a sleek glass skyscraper in midtown, where he tends to his philanthropic activities and oversees his art collection. A Matisse watercolor hangs in the reception room, and there are boxes full of Sotheby's catalogues in an assistant's office. Whitehead worked on Wall Street until the mid-nineteen-eighties, when he left to join the Reagan Administration as George Shultz's deputy secretary of state. He has no experience in building or construction. Nevertheless, last fall, when Governor Pataki decided to set up the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, he evidently felt that he needed someone well connected to the financial world who could bring a statesmanlike gravitas to the rebuilding process, and he asked Whitehead to become the L.M.D.C.'s chairman. "I was at a phase in my life where I was getting out of things, gradually reducing my workload," Whitehead said to me recently. "But the Governor twisted my arm quite hard."

Whitehead is gracious and affable. Although he is not a native New Yorker—he grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and didn't move into the city full time until his children were grown—he has close ties to both the business and civic communities. I had lunch with him a few weeks ago at the Links Club, a small private club in a neo-Georgian town house on East Sixty-second Street. Whitehead is a man of medium height, with gray hair and a craggy look that calls to mind a prosperous New England farmer. He is eighty, but he looks ten years younger. "I didn't realize how complicated this problem is," he said. "Everything is interrelated. You can't build a building without subways to get to it, and power and communications—all of this has to be planned. The other thing that surprised me is the complexities of the constituencies. There are the families of the victims. They have suffered the most. Then, there are the residents of the area, and the commuters who come from New Jersey, Staten Island, the Bronx—they all have a harder time now. And there are small shopkeepers whose businesses were badly damaged, and developers, and heads of big companies, and culture and the arts and education. There are fifty thousand students down there. All of this has to be taken into consideration."

Whitehead seemed most at ease when he talked about details, the way a person building a house might talk about doorjambs and fixtures. "I can envision a museum as part of the site," he said, "with an entrance and a place to learn something about what happened, and maybe a rotunda with the names of the people who died. And then upstairs more about the World Trade Center, and a place where you can go to the bathroom or buy something to take away."

Whitehead has no obvious agenda, beyond putting a mix of cultural facilities and commercial development on the site. One day not long ago, he announced abruptly that he thought it would be a good idea for Ground Zero to house a biotechnology research facility, so his staff hastily added that to a list of general principles for redevelopment. He has said respectful things to the families of the victims, including how he could imagine devoting a portion of the site to a memorial on a par with the Lincoln Memorial or the Jefferson Memorial. "They're on relatively small but beautiful sites," he said of the memorials in Washington, which is not exactly what many of the family members wanted to hear.

There are a lot of ideas about what kind of memorial should be established, among them the notion that the entire site be dedicated to the victims. This is the extreme view, and it has been advocated vociferously by Monica Iken, a thirty-two-year-old former schoolteacher from Riverdale whose husband, Michael, a bond trader, died on September 11th, a few days after his thirty-seventh birthday. They had been married for eleven months. "I couldn't believe that my whole life was over in an instant," she said to me. "Two weeks after it happened, I knew that I had to go on a mission. I couldn't let it rest." Iken established the September's Mission foundation. "My husband went poof in the air," she said. "I can't mourn at a final resting place. I need somewhere peaceful that I can go to feel his energy, to connect to him. The world is watching to see whether we do the right thing. We have to slow down this process so we can heal."

It upsets Iken that the families of victims are not going to have primary control over the memorial design, the way families did in Oklahoma City after the bombing of the federal office building there. "In other cities, they don't put offices and living space and memorials in the same place," she says. "I understand the need to rebuild, to get New York up and running. But they have to understand that it's not a quick fix."

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's offices are on the twentieth floor of 1 Liberty Plaza, a skyscraper that overlooks Ground Zero. A room has been set aside there for family members who want to view the site in privacy. The other day, John Whitehead was in the office and was told that there was a widow with three young children in the room who wanted to speak to an official. "I felt it was my duty to talk to her," Whitehead said. "She was a poor woman from out of town, she knew no one in New York, she had gone to see the site for the first time, and when she saw that workers were laying subway tracks she broke down. She said that was where she thought her husband had died."

I asked him what he said to her.

"What is there to say?" he replied. "I tried to comfort her. I told her that there were places that could give her help, and I directed her to them." But the development corporation's job is to build.

Work on new subway tracks and station platforms began a couple of months ago, when the recovery operation wound down and it became possible to start restoring the 1 and 9 subway lines and the PATH transit lines to New Jersey, which were knocked out of service on September 11th. These lines ran directly under the World Trade Center, and unless they were moved some distance away—which in the case of the PATH trains would mean shifting the location of a tunnel under the Hudson River—it would not be possible to keep the site empty and treat it entirely as hallowed ground. You would have had to interpret hallowed ground as beginning above the subway lines—hallowed ground with the bustle of a major urban transit node underneath it.

The World Trade Center was conceived by David Rockefeller, the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and his brother Nelson, the governor of New York. Businesses had been moving out of the historic financial district for some time, because midtown was more convenient and livelier. David Rockefeller first tried to stem the move north by building a new headquarters for his bank on Pine Street: an eight-hundred-foot-high glass-and-aluminum tower designed by the architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which was completed in 1960. Then Rockefeller and the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, the area's business group, asked Skidmore to prepare a broader plan for lower Manhattan. They dusted off an idea that had been proposed in the late nineteen-forties and rejected for lack of demand: a complex of buildings on the East River, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge, that would house businesses involved in international trade.

The Rockefeller brothers asked the Port Authority, which combines the qualities of a private corporation with the powers of a government agency, to handle the construction of the new complex. The Port Authority, which was created in 1921, was commissioned to build a rail tunnel under New York Harbor, connecting New Jersey to the Brooklyn piers. The tunnel never got built, but the Port Authority ended up running the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the George Washington Bridge, several bridges on Staten Island, and all three New York airports. The Port Authority was experienced at building and managing things, its profitable enterprises gave it plenty of money, and it had the power to condemn property through eminent domain. It could also issue bonds on its own, so the cost of the Trade Center would not have to be applied to the New York State budget. But there was a complication. Since control of the Port Authority was shared by New York and New Jersey, either state's governor could veto a project. Robert Meyner, the governor of New Jersey, was not inclined to endorse a huge project for lower Manhattan without some benefit for New Jersey, and he suggested that the Port Authority take over the nearly bankrupt Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, a dreary, rattletrap commuter line that ran under the Hudson River. If the Port Authority bailed out the railroad, New Jersey wouldn't have to. The Port Authority agreed to this, and the railroad was renamed Port Authority Trans-Hudson, or PATH.

As part of the deal, the Port Authority also became the owner of a pair of office buildings on Church Street that had been erected in 1908 over the railroad's Manhattan terminus. The buildings needed millions of dollars' worth of renovations, and the agency decided to tear them down. Someone got the idea of putting the Trade Center there, instead of on the East River, and neither Rockefeller objected. The location of the World Trade Center was determined not by any kind of master plan, or by any planners at all. It was the result of a political deal to bail out a railroad.

Austin Tobin, the head of the Port Authority, eventually took over the whole project. He wanted his own architect, and he hired Yamasaki. Tobin decided that there should be ten million square feet of office space, about five times as much as the Empire State Building. Thus the original idea of the project, revitalizing lower Manhattan, got lost. The trade center did nothing to solve the area's problems, which were a lack of easy access from most of the region and a lack of housing and cultural amenities. And it increased the supply of the one thing the area had too much of already, which was office space. When Yamasaki concluded that the best way to create all the office space Tobin wanted was to erect a pair of towers that would be the world's tallest buildings, Tobin said that was precisely what he had been hoping for.

Public-works czars like Tobin—he is less famous than Robert Moses, but, unlike Moses, he almost always got his way—are generally understood to be in short supply these days. It is inconceivable that a handful of politicians and bankers could make a deal to start one of the world's largest construction projects in the middle of New York City now, the way the Rockefellers launched the World Trade Center in the early nineteen-sixties. Austin Tobin was able to decide, pretty much on his own, that the center should take the form of the tallest skyscrapers ever built, and he carried out his plan unburdened by lawsuits, environmental-impact statements, or any community opposition to speak of. (Some of the shop owners on Radio Row started a legal action to block construction, but the challenge didn't amount to much.)

Rudolph Giuliani, in his last speech before leaving office, said that he didn't want the World Trade Center site to be developed. He preferred a "soaring memorial." Giuliani was speaking as a lame duck who was going to have no official role in the rebuilding process. But, of course, Giuliani's political legacy is intimately tied to his leadership in the weeks following September 11th. If the site remained Ground Zero forever, Giuliani's central role in the epic of catastrophe would be memorialized even more concretely than it already is.

Governor Pataki, who faces reëlection this year, is in a different position. Giuliani controlled the management of Ground Zero, and the business of clearing it and of providing assistance to families of the victims, but Pataki holds most of the cards for the rebuilding process. The Port Authority can't make a move without his assent, but it has no obligation to listen to the mayor. (In fact, its relationship with the city has been troubled. Giuliani sued the Port Authority, claiming that rent it was paying to the city for Kennedy and LaGuardia Airports was inadequate. The claim is being arbitrated.) Pataki also controls the Empire State Development Corporation, the state agency that is empowered to build anything anywhere in the state and can override local zoning laws if it chooses; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway lines; and the Battery Park City Authority, which built and manages Battery Park City, next door to Ground Zero. And Pataki has one more source of power: federal funds to assist in rebuilding will flow primarily through the state government, not the city.

No existing agency was equipped to coördinate everything, so Pataki created the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation. The L.M.D.C., as first conceived, had eleven board members, seven of whom were to be appointed by the governor and four by the mayor. In the event that Mark Green, a Democrat, was elected mayor, as most people expected him to be, Pataki would retain control of the L.M.D.C. After Green lost to Michael Bloomberg, the board was expanded, without fanfare, by four more members, appointed by the mayor.

Still, by any measure, it is Pataki's game. The city, astonishingly, has no official role in the planning process, although Daniel Doctoroff, Bloomberg's deputy mayor in charge of economic development, has functioned as a kind of city ambassador to the planning effort "by sheer force of personality," as one planner put it. The decision about what to do with the World Trade Center site will be made by people whom Pataki appointed and who are, by and large, loyal to him: Charles Gargano, who is both head of the Empire State Development Corporation and vice-chairman of the Port Authority; Louis Tomson, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation; Joseph Seymour, executive director of the Port Authority; and Peter Kalikow, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Every couple of weeks, they gather in Pataki's office on Third Avenue to give a progress report on lower Manhattan, and that is where major decisions are made. The most prominent person at Pataki's conference table, John Whitehead, is the only one who owes the Governor little.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation started its work last fall by setting up advisory committees that included local residents, business people, and members of victims' families. When the World Trade Center was built, almost nobody lived nearby. Now there is one residential neighborhood to the west, Battery Park City, and a very different one to the north, Tribeca. Tens of thousands of people live in converted office buildings in the financial district. More people live just a few blocks away, around the South Street Seaport, the site that the World Trade Center was originally supposed to occupy.

The L.M.D.C. spent months asking all these people what they thought should be built on the site, and a couple of weeks ago it issued eleven "principles for action" and a fourteen-point "blueprint for renewal." The principles seem benign: creating a memorial to the victims of the September 11th attacks, improving transit access to lower Manhattan, expanding public open space, enhancing the economic vitality of the area. But is it possible to create an appropriate memorial and also increase the area's strength as a financial center? Is improving the neighborhoods going to get in the way of developing lower Manhattan as a tourist and cultural magnet? And if you create a "comprehensive, coherent plan for transit access to lower Manhattan"—in other words, a new station for the mess of disconnected subway and other transit lines downtown—will it cost so much that it will put other transit plans, like the Second Avenue subway, at risk?

Before the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation makes any final recommendations, it will prepare a menu of options. Dozens of civic organizations have been jockeying for position in this process. In the days immediately following September 11th, Robert Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, decided that no one would pay attention to these groups unless they banded together, so he organized them into something called the Civic Alliance. There is also a group of architects and planners, called New York New Visions, and a group called Rebuild Downtown Our Town, and then there is Community Board 1, the city's official advisory board for the neighborhood, which has status but no real power. Six hundred and fifty people attended a Civic Alliance meeting at the South Street Seaport in February, and five thousand are expected to convene this summer to discuss the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's menu.

What to do with lower Manhattan is not just a matter of agreeing with John Whitehead about an ideal New York neighborhood, or with Monica Iken about a huge memorial. It is a struggle between the forces of participatory democracy and the notion of the big idea, the bold gesture. Boldness has been pretty much out of fashion in city-planning circles for a while, especially in lower Manhattan, where it is associated not only with projects like the World Trade Center but with unrealized schemes like the expressway Robert Moses wanted to run across downtown, which would have destroyed SoHo. Sometimes, though, boldness leads to great architecture, and to the sublime. You rarely get these qualities when seeking a consensus.

Architects, planners, public officials, members of victims' families, and developers speak about respecting the magnitude of the tragedy that occurred at the World Trade Center site, but they use the phrase to justify entirely different ideas about what should be built, or not built. There was even talk of re-creating the twin towers. This idea has a certain sentimental appeal, as if New York were following the example of Venice, which built a replica of the campanile in St. Mark's Square after the original one collapsed in 1902. But it is surely not a possibility, not least because the safety of very tall buildings has been seriously called into doubt.

The Trade Center was unprofitable for years. Fifty floors of one tower were occupied by New York state offices, and the other tower included Port Authority headquarters. (The Trade Center never had enough tenants in international trade to be worthy of its name.) Eventually, in the boom of the nineteen-nineties, the towers attracted financial firms, and the Port Authority, which had always managed the center, decided that it might be valuable enough to be profitably leased to a private developer. But the economics of mega-skyscrapers are problematic at best. (They cost too much to build, and too much space on the lower floors is taken up by elevators to the higher ones.) There hasn't been much interest in building them in this country for more than a generation, except for proposals every so often from Donald Trump that no one takes very seriously. Only one skyscraper taller than the World Trade Center has ever been built in the United States—the Sears Tower in Chicago, which was finished in 1974. Since then, super-tall towers have gone up in places like Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, cities that are interested mainly in the symbolic nature of such buildings.

Six weeks before the World Trade Center towers were destroyed, the Port Authority completed the process of leasing them for ninety-nine years to Larry Silverstein, the developer who had built 7 World Trade Center. Simultaneously, the retail space underneath the complex was leased to Westfield America, the U.S. division of an Australian company that is one of the world's largest operators of shopping malls. Silverstein and Westfield were given the right to rebuild the structures if they were destroyed, and Westfield has the right to expand the amount of retail space by thirty per cent. Joseph Seymour, who was appointed executive director of the Port Authority in December to succeed Neil Levin, who was killed on September 11th, told me that the Port Authority understands that it makes no sense to put the towers back, despite the terms of the lease. "They have legal rights to build what was there, but everybody realizes that's impractical," he said. "You're not going to be able to put up two hundred-and-ten-story towers. So we will be negotiating as we go forward."

Larry Silverstein is seventy-one years old. He wears white shirts with gold cufflinks, and he is relentlessly enthusiastic. He's an old-fashioned New York real-estate operator. Silverstein owns several major office buildings, but his headquarters is a somewhat dowdy-looking suite in a midtown tower that belongs to someone else. It could be the office of a prosperous dentist, except that the conference room is lined with renderings, in pseudo-Impressionist style, of several of Silverstein's buildings: 120 Broadway, 11 West Forty-second Street, 711 Fifth Avenue.

In the days following the terrorist attack, Silverstein announced grandly that he had a "moral obligation" to rebuild the Trade Center as it had been. But if people weren't comfortable in such enormous skyscrapers anymore, Silverstein said, he would be happy to accommodate them by building four fifty-story towers instead of two hundred-and-ten story ones. He commissioned his architect, David Childs, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, to draw up plans. Childs knew the Trade Center well; his office is around the corner on Wall Street, and last summer, as soon as Silverstein's lease was signed, the developer had asked Childs to start working on a plan to make the twin towers more desirable to high-end tenants.

Silverstein's instant rebuilding plan came to be seen as a publicity grab more than a serious notion, and he soon realized that he had no power to set a timetable. Even the Port Authority was going to have to pay some attention to public opinion, and nobody was going to build anything until the process of searching the site for remains was complete. Since his other lost building, 7 World Trade Center, was not part of the original complex and had none of the symbolic weight of the twin towers, he thought that he would encounter little objection if he built on that site, and he asked David Childs to draw up plans for it. "I would start building this at 9 A.M. tomorrow if I could," he said to me when I met with him at his office on Fifth Avenue one morning last winter.

Silverstein was pleased with the drawings Childs produced, which called for a wide glass tower cantilevered over a narrower stainless-steel base. "The old No. 7 was a stone building—heavy, massive," Silverstein said. "This time around, we will build something much lighter in feel." But Childs says that he began to change his mind about his proposal for a new building. He didn't like the way the bulk of the tower projected outward, and how from a block or two uptown it would still seem to sit in the middle of the street, obstructing the view down Greenwich Street, just as the old No. 7 had. The more Childs thought about it, the less sure he became that simply opening up the bottom of the building solved the problem.

David Childs is one of the most visible architects in New York. He designed the huge AOL Time Warner headquarters now going up at Columbus Circle and the new Penn Station planned for the post office on Eighth Avenue. He is known for being attentive to the demands of corporate clients while keeping himself on the right side of the city's arbiters of design—he joined forces with Frank Gehry to design an entry in the competition for the headquarters of the New York Times a couple of years ago—and he was uneasy about the effect that giving in to Silverstein's demands would have on his reputation. In the middle of February, he found an unexpected ally in Alexander Garvin, the head of planning for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Garvin, who teaches planning at Yale and is a member of the New York City Planning Commission, had barely started his new job with the L.M.D.C. when he went to see Silverstein about No. 7. He had a temporary office, with a borrowed phone. "I was on the subway going uptown to meet with Silverstein for the first time," he recalled recently, "and I realized that I had to think of No. 7 as a test case." He got off the train at Grand Central, walked to Silverstein's office, and told the developer and David Childs that the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation would not be likely to approve the design unless the building was reshaped to allow Greenwich Street to run through the site.

No. 7 covered two blocks at the northern edge of the original World Trade Center site. It was built over a Con Edison power station and an access ramp for trucks entering the Trade Center's underground loading docks. If the restored Greenwich Street ran through the space, as Garvin insisted, and No. 7 became smaller, the Con Edison substation would have to be smaller also. Garvin went to his boss, Louis Tomson, and asked for help in persuading Con Edison to accommodate this arrangement. Tomson, who has been close to Pataki for years, is one of those behind-the-scenes operatives who get their calls returned immediately, since everyone knows he speaks for the Governor. If Whitehead's job is to confer a kind of eminence on the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Tomson's job is to get things done. In this case, Garvin and Tomson had to learn something about how much space electric transformers need. It turned out that they did not all have to be placed together, but Con Edison did not, at first, volunteer this information. The ten transformers could be split into two groups of five, which Childs placed on opposite sides of the building. That allowed room in the middle for the lobby—which in the old No. 7 had been on top of the power station—and the elevator core.

"Planning in the city is not as simple as a set of urban-design principles," Garvin said to me later, "and electric power in lower Manhattan is more important than a view corridor. But why can't we have both? If you push hard enough, you can find a way."

Long ago, Garvin devised a method for teaching his course at Yale that is based on students playing roles in games that are intended to show how planning actually takes place. One student might play an architect, another a developer, another a city official, another a citizen who is protesting the developer's project, and another a rival developer trying to make a different deal for the land. Garvin gives the students a few starting points, and then he lets the process play out, without a script. "I am now living in the middle of the most complicated game of all," he said to me. "Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine a game that would be like this one. You'd have to be an idiot to think that this can be done in a back room. This has to be a public process."

Nevertheless, Garvin has strong feelings about what should and should not happen, and he intends to fight for what he believes. "There is not going to be a plan that will come full-blown from the head of Zeus, or Garvin," he said. "But they are not going to build a suburban shopping mall, whatever they may think. And I am telling you right now that no one is building in the bed of Greenwich Street, period."

While Larry Silverstein and David Childs were struggling over the question of No. 7, Childs and Marilyn Jordan Taylor, another partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, were working on a plan for the entire site at the request of Silverstein and John Zuccotti, the head of Brookfield Financial Properties, a real-estate firm that owns much of the office space adjacent to Ground Zero. Zuccotti controls most of the World Financial Center, the four-building office complex in Battery Park City that contains the headquarters of Merrill Lynch and American Express. After Silverstein, he is the landlord most affected by September 11th, and he has a particular problem with the World Financial Center. It was hard enough to get there from the rest of lower Manhattan before September 11th, but now the Financial Center is even more isolated.

I visited Childs and Taylor at their office in the old Bankers Trust Building on Wall Street. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is the only architecture firm in the country that has managed to maintain a blue-chip reputation long after its founding partners died, and in some ways it resembles a corporate law firm as much as an architectural practice. Its design work is serious, if not always cutting-edge, but, more to the point, its partners are deeply connected to the city's power structure. Taylor was a founding member of the New York New Visions group, and after September 11th she seemed to be at every public forum, every hearing, and every committee meeting in town. She was criticized by some of her colleagues for playing both sides of the fence: she and Childs were Larry Silverstein's architects at the same time that she was helping to draft the New Visions recommendations for what Silverstein should do, and it was sometimes hard to be sure whom she was speaking for.

Childs and Taylor have come up with a plan that manages to steer a way between the slightly mannered, stage-set quality of Battery Park City and the superblock aspects of the World Trade Center design. "The site was a wound even before the Trade Center came down, like it was in Brasília or something," Childs said. "Our first thought was can we bring it back, weave it into the city?" Childs excused himself and went into another room. He brought back a set of scale drawings that showed the Trade Center site in comparison with other parts of Manhattan. It is as big as Rockefeller Center, which is neatly woven into the street grid, and bigger than all of Lincoln Center, which is not.

Childs and Taylor are proposing putting back the biggest streets that were taken away, like Greenwich Street and Fulton and Dey Streets, which run east and west, but not restoring every part of the grid. Most people would go along with that, although Silverstein's partner in the Trade Center lease, the mall developer Westfield America, made more money on the Trade Center's retail space—about nine hundred dollars a square foot—than it did on any of its suburban malls anywhere in the United States, and it has been pushing hard to build a new, enclosed mall on the site that would bridge several streets. Westfield is not a company known for paying much attention to design, and its chairman, Frank Lowy, is not particularly attuned to what you might call the cultural meaning of streets in Manhattan. Silverstein is an old-time New Yorker who can read the city's political winds, and he felt that the pressure to put back the streets was not something he wanted to resist. Westfield has been slower to catch on. The company will probably not oppose the notion of letting some streets go through the property, but it still wants as much of the retail space as possible to be indoors, as in a suburban mall.

The Childs and Taylor plan calls for some kind of major transit hub. The Regional Plan Association has suggested tying together the various intersecting subway lines and the PATH station into a new complex called Fulton Central Station, and Childs has made a version of this the centerpiece of his plan. "We need a great public room, a huge space that would be a Grand Central for the twenty-first century," he said. Childs's station would be a kind of vestibule for downtown, with shopping, restaurants, and a monumental public space. He refers to the scheme as "a compelling idea based on infrastructure," and that somewhat geeky phrase is indicative of where the planning process is now. Everyone is preoccupied with fixing the broken infrastructure, and big ideas have to address that in order to have credibility.

Larry Silverstein and John Zuccotti had also asked Alexander Cooper, of Cooper Robertson & Partners, to work on the plan for the World Trade Center site, but Cooper and Childs discovered after a few weeks that they had different ideas about what parts of the site could be built on, so the two firms ended up producing separate plans. Cooper is one of the most famous urban designers in the world—he was a co-designer of Battery Park City, and he probably did as much as anyone to shift taste in the direction of doing things like restoring Greenwich Street. His loyalty to customary ways of designing cities runs deep. He is a thin, tightly wound man in his mid-sixties with wavy gray hair and rimless glasses, and while his office, in an old industrial building in the West Forties, seems less corporate than that of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, his work is more traditional. Cooper feels that restoring street life is the first priority for any design in lower Manhattan. But he envisions a row of bulky towers along Greenwich Street on the eastern side of the site, a kind of downtown version of Sixth Avenue. "There is a certain power to this as a setting for the memorial," he said to me. "A wall of buildings around a memorial."

Cooper insists that the entire "footprint," the precise location of the twin towers, be considered off limits for a new building. The footprint is a parallelogram of roughly seven acres. "It's just right for a memorial—almost exactly the size of Bryant Park," he says. Cooper's plan includes a cultural center just south of the memorial. This would require the demolition of 90 West Street, a landmark office building by Cass Gilbert that was seriously damaged on September 11th and which preservationists want to see repaired. Childs and Taylor's plan puts a new opera house northeast of the Cass Gilbert building, which saves the landmark but cuts slightly into the south tower's footprint.

Cooper's plan is focussed heavily on transportation, which is a particular concern of his main client, John Zuccotti. The plan includes an idea that has become widely accepted, which is to put West Street underground. West Street is the ten-lane road that divides the Trade Center site from Battery Park City and the World Financial Center. It was supposed to become an interstate highway, Westway. The controversial Westway project was finally shelved in 1990, but a two-hundred-and-sixty-foot gulf still separates Battery Park City from the rest of Manhattan. Rerouting West Street underground from Chambers Street south to Battery Place would free up sixteen acres of land, and, even if some of that land were to be used for a new, narrower street for local traffic, enough usable land would be created to have a significant impact on the neighborhood. But it would cost roughly a billion and a half dollars, because water mains and power conduits would have to be relocated, and the new street constructed in the form of a watertight tunnel, since West Street is on landfill that is above the water table. The main sewer pipe for lower Manhattan runs under West Street for several blocks and would have to be moved.

The centerpiece of the Cooper plan is a new station in lower Manhattan for the Long Island Rail Road. Working with the engineering firm Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Cooper has figured out a way in which L.I.R.R. passengers could travel from Jamaica station directly to lower Manhattan on a high-speed express, using existing subway tunnels, to reach a new terminus on the Trade Center site. Zuccotti likes this because it would tie downtown directly to the suburban train network for the first time ever. The problem with the plan is that it would cost more than a billion dollars and serve relatively few passengers. High-speed ferries that took railroad passengers from Long Island City to Wall Street might be just as fast, and a lot cheaper.

Last fall, when the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was formed, the Port Authority was an agency in trauma. It had lost its executive director and seventy-five staff members, and its most famous possession had been blown to bits. At that point, it looked as if the L.M.D.C. would be calling the shots regarding the future of the site, which pleased a lot of people in the planning and design worlds, since the Port Authority's track record as a patron of architecture has been appalling. When it is in charge of building things, we end up with the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan, or Newark airport.

In the last few weeks, however, the Port Authority has asserted itself. At the end of March, Alexander Garvin asked several architectural firms to submit proposals to the L.M.D.C., which made Port Authority officials angry, since they had not been asked for advice. Garvin had to rescind the request, and the Port Authority reissued it in a more bureaucratic-sounding version. This was embarrassing, but things have calmed down. "Why would we want to go to war with the Port Authority when we could do this in partnership?" an L.M.D.C. staff member said to me. "If we went to war, they could tie this up forever." Louis Tomson, the president of the L.M.D.C., and Joseph Seymour, the executive director of the Port Authority, negotiated a "memorandum of understanding." The L.M.D.C. agreed not to attempt to unilaterally impose a plan for the World Trade Center site, and the Port Authority, which has in the past operated with lordly independence, pledged to work with the L.M.D.C. The Port Authority agreed to give up some of its land for a memorial and to include cultural facilities as well as commercial buildings on the site. The memorandum of understanding also refers to the potential reopening of a street-grid pattern, which may be the Port Authority's biggest concession, since some of its land would become public thoroughfares.

Fifteen teams of engineers and architects responded to the request for proposals, and the Port Authority and the L.M.D.C. will choose one of them as the chief consultant for the site. "We need to figure out the location of a new PATH terminal, and how to deal with West Street and the whole underground land-use pattern—a hundred different things," Alexander Garvin said. David Childs, Marilyn Jordan Taylor, and Alexander Cooper declined to compete for the job. They remain on the payrolls of the real-estate developers who commissioned them, and will be in a position to design all or some of the buildings when the time to select architects arrives, perhaps a year from now.

Whatever gets built will have to be approved by the governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, who has the same veto power that Governor Meyner had over the World Trade Center forty years ago. McGreevey may well ask what's in it for him. He will surely support plans for a memorial, since so many of the people who died at the Trade Center on September 11th were residents of New Jersey, and he is likely to welcome plans that improve PATH service. But the Port Authority will have to come up with a plan that keeps rental income flowing across the Hudson River.

Alexander Garvin says that Childs and Taylor's plan convinced him that it was possible to accommodate multiple uses: "I've seen ten schemes already that demonstrate that you can provide revenue, put in civic functions, and have real blocks and real streets. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm just saying it's doable. If it were easy, I wouldn't have a job." None of the plans will include apartments, since the Port Authority can't, legally, build housing. But there may well be a new theatre for the New York City Opera. "If we can think of a new opera house as a kind of living memorial," Sherwin Goldman, the executive producer of the company, said to me, "then we would be very excited about going down there."

Ground Zero is in many ways like Potsdamer Platz, in Berlin, which was a void in the city's heart for nearly half a century, cleared by Allied bombs, left empty as a no man's land east of the Berlin Wall, and redeveloped only in the last decade. Potsdamer Platz was turned into a mixed-use complex of offices, housing, and shops. Much of it was designed by one of the world's great architects, Renzo Piano, who wanted to make it feel "normal," and he did, to a fault. The well-meaning dullness of Potsdamer Platz underscores a paradox that is at the heart of the dilemma of what to do with Ground Zero. The World Trade Center stood for bigness and aloofness from the urban fabric, and today we are more inclined to value smallness and connection. But we want to honor the audacity that the towers represented, and also to memorialize the catastrophe that destroyed them.

The monument issue is complicated by a tendency in the last few years to think of public memorials as "healing" places for families. But great memorials also inspire awe, and make it possible to transcend the simply personal meaning of an event. The best way to deal with the memorial is probably to have an international design competition—that is how Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was found, and how Oklahoma City determined the design for the memorial to the victims of the 1995 bombing. It takes a while to manage such a competition, which is all to the good. The metaphors that make for powerful memorials tend to be clearer when the immediate experience of a catastrophic event recedes.

One of the more astonishing things about the aftermath of September 11th was the extent to which people perceived the skyline as an aesthetic object in itself, and the destruction of it as painful, even devastating. We do not want or need another hundred-and-ten-story skyscraper, but we could repair the broken skyline with some kind of great tower, perhaps a broadcast tower or an observation tower—a twenty-first-century Eiffel Tower for New York, which would use the technology of our time as aggressively and inventively as Eiffel used the technology of the nineteenth century. It might transcend the contradiction between the comfortable neighborhood so many people seem to want and the powerful idea that the site's painful history demands.

Ground Zero is not like the landfill that was used for Battery Park City, next door. It will always resonate with what happened on September 11th. I hope that whatever is done there incorporates shards and pieces of steel, the twisted remnants of the façade of the World Trade Center. There is a risk that in a few years the shards will seem simply like abstract sculpture, but it is a risk worth taking, for it is more likely that they will endure as noble ruins. Our history is not so long or so deep, and we have rarely had the kinds of experiences that create ruins. ♦

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